Ruby Rogues - Discourse with Jeff Atwood

30 May 2013

Ruby Rogues is one of the handful of podcasts I usually listen to. This week featured Jeff Atwood who talked about
Discourse, a phenomenal forum platform. Jeff’s thoughts on several things really struck home so I wanted to jot them down.
You might find these thought-provoking, too. The full transcription is available here

Installing a binary app per device is a huge step backward from the web world where you don’t have to download and upgrade anything. You just go to the website and it works.

Betting on Javascript is a very safe bet. The competition has been the fiercest among browser performances, that is Javascript engines on the client. The engines are guaranteed to improve.

Desktop computers are -in most cases- more performant than the server the application is hosted on. So it makes sense to push computations to the clients, and spread it out among them.

[Discourse] using postgres is a way to force hosting providers move out of the “server herpes” (PHP + MySQL). As Discourse becomes more popular, this will give more leverage to remove the herpes from servers.

Why was it [the server side] built in Ruby/Rails? Robin Ward made a game about forums and Jeff contacted him to build Discourse. Robin had used Ruby and thus this decided the Ruby or Python question.

Rule of 3. Kind of a philoshopical belief for Jeff. A component (e.g a datepicker) is proven to be reusable if it was successfully used in three different contexts. Having three major partners for Discourse will really be a tipping point. Etc.

Since Discourse is mainly a rich, client-side app, Ember plays a much bigger role in its success (or failure) then Ruby. The question is how will Rubyists adapt to Ember, whether they will like it or not.